Fixing Baseball

Baseball season is underway, and already we have seen great moments, great games, great tributes, and great plays. Despite what anyone says, baseball is the best sport out there, and Major League Baseball is the best professional league in the States. While the NBA is becoming more and more a pussified sport, while the NFL has been slowly sucking all the fun out of theirs, there is always major league baseball to depend on for the spring and the summer. But, like all the pro sports, it definitely isn’t perfect. There can be a few changes to enhance what greatness is already there. I have assembled a variety of ideas (this is all free folks) that will be sure to make the game quicker, make the game more effective, and fix all the tiny little bugs MLB has experienced over the years.

To start things off, the playoff format is perfect, just saying. The Wild Card inclusion makes for some great and heavily competitive baseball, right up to the end. However, the season containing 162 games is perhaps a bit much, especially with society having more and more trouble following anything past five seconds. Somewhere between 135-142 games would be more effective. While that is still many more games than the average sport, baseball is the one sport in which anybody can beat anybody on any given day, it’s just that unpredictable. While I have yet to consider 162 games as overkill, minimizing the amount of games would add a bit more weight to every matchup. Another little suggestion, we should have more interleague games, and should have a tiny raffle before every season to randomly place one AL team to take on an NL team. This way, lower-market teams like the Reds and Nationals still have a chance to take on the Yankees and Red Sox.

Now these upcoming changes are to speed up the individual games themselves---just a little. For starters, after seven foul balls, it should equal a strike. I don’t see this rule ever being enforced, but it would definitely destroy those eternal fouling battles we get from time to time. Now, every quarter of play (three innings), only three timeouts on the mound are allowed. If they were to call another timeout when they don’t have any more, it’s automatically a strike. Another thing that should be limited is pitching changes. Personally, I think that only two pitching changes are allowed per team, per inning, no more. The only exception is if the pitcher gets injured. That idea won’t get off the ground either.

Instant replay, I am not a fan of, especially because of the fear that they will use it towards every play out there loosely questionable. Instead, MLB should follow what the NFL does: the challenge flag. Both teams should be allowed three challenges per game. If the call is overturned, they whether reset the play or change the call. Otherwise, if the ruling stands, then the next batter starts off with a strike automatically. The only time the umpires challenge a play without a flag being tossed is on the very last inning. This system isn’t perfect, but it will prevent from an overload of instant replays. After all, with baseball being the slowest sport this side of golf, it doesn’t help the pacing with 5 minutes of replaying a previous moment.

The biggest change is steroids: if you are caught, you are automatically banned. With that being said, to limit and destroy any clouds of questioning, all the names from that damn report should be released. Finally, please, just unveil all the names, just not the major ones. This way, we can see the innocent as well as the guilty. This one is simple; drugs like steroids are cheating and should be banned. Not to mention, they are not healthy at all.

Honestly, that’s about it. Can’t think about much more changing that baseball needs. There is always the salary cap, but I can’t even consider a solution to that one—that one will require true, incredible thinking. If I have a solution, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, if you have other ideas to change the ways of baseball, feel free to present them.

Go Rays!!